Rapid7 Blog

Q&amp;A with Sysdig's Chris Crane + Upcoming Webinar

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This Thursday, September 17th, we’ll be teaming up with Sysdig to explore “container monitoring as a microservice” – the practice of achieving deep, container-level insight while following microservice best practices. During the webinar, Logentries’ Co-Founder Trevor Parsons and Sysdig’s COO Chris Crane will be providing live demos of what metrics you should be collecting and how you should be tracking these metrics.

Chris: Containers are a potentially game changing technology. They may have started as “just” lightweight VMs, but now it’s becoming more and more clear that containers can fundamentally change the way we create, deploy, and scale software. The reality though, is that while containers may be simple themselves, containerization introduces significant complexity into a system. Many of the core features of containers that make them so powerful – simplicity, isolation, portability, reproducibility – also make them much more difficult to manage. They’re untouchable black boxes! I believe that a whole generation of infrastructure software will need to adapt now, and new ecosystem of technologies is already emerging. That’s exciting!

Matt: What’s your take on the container market today?

Chris: Container technologies are being adopted at a rate that is practically unheard of in our industry. But we are also constantly hearing that getting visibility inside containers is impractical and a blocker to deploying container technologies like Docker and CoreOS in production environments. Organizations are struggling to get the same types of metrics from inside containers that they’ve grown accustomed to from monitoring and logging in VMs over the years. Sysdig and Logentries are taking a unique approach to enabling visibility inside containers, which we will cover at length in the webinar.

Matt: What are some examples of container metrics you think are important to monitor and measure?

Chris: Basic things like container properties and system resource usage metrics are a great starting point. But where container visibility starts to get really interesting is when you can analyze application and network activity inside containers, and fully correlate this with the rest of your infrastructure. Trevor and I will be showing how to do this kind of thing with live demos of Sysdig Cloud and Logentries during the webinar.